Should You Leave?

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

A tour de force of analytical insight...moving and edifying.
— The New York Times

Wall Street Journal

A thinking person's self-help book.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Those who read Kramer's 1993 bestseller, Listening to Prozac, won't be surprised to find him occasionally flying the Prozac colors again in his latest, a self-described "odd hybrid of fiction, non-fiction and self-help." But Kramer generally limits his discussion of psychopharmaceuticals in this fascinating philosophical and psychological study of what makes relationships thrive or wither, concentrating instead on fictional case histories and an exhaustive review of 19th- and 20th-century theories of intimacy and community. When it comes to love, Kramer, a Brown University psychiatry professor who also has his own private practice, is a frank, but not unambivalent, advocate of sticking it out. He argues that couples who were compatible enough to commit to each other in the first place are probably well enough matched to succeed in the long haul as well, albeit not, in some cases at least, without some serious interpersonal spadework. In this he takes issue with the contemporary premium on autonomy, whose varying levels of boosterism he examines in everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sren Kierkegaard and Ann Landers to such analysts as Murray Bowen, Carl Rogers and Leston Havens. He also looks at some proponents of connectivity, including philosopher Stanley Cavell, analyst Carl Whitaker and 1970s feminist psychoanalyst Jean Baker Miller, who argued that "autonomy is a delusion." Even Kramer's excessive handwringing over both the inherent tackiness of relationship manuals and his profession's historic censure of advice-giving can't dilute the pleasure to be had from this thoughtful, finely nuanced work. Kramer is that rare psychoanalytic theorist who is as comfortable invoking Tillie Olsen as Freud, and his composite case histories have the verisimilitude and insight that is the hallmark of the best and truest fiction.

Library Journal

You've had enough or so you think. But should you really leave? Kramer, author of the best-selling Listening to Prozac, examines how people seek an answer to this crucial question of the heart. Along the way he offers great insights into the human condition and helps the reader to understand why we each do what we do about interpersonal relationships on the brink of a breakup. The book is concerned with more than just answering the title's basic question. It also delves into the intricate and complicated issue of psychotherapy and advice itself. Kramer contemplates the role of the therapist as well as the unspoken law against offering advice to his clients. Written with a keen ear for narrative, this nonfiction title reads more like well-written fiction: smooth as silk. -- Marty Dean Evensvold, Magnolia Public Library, Texas

Library Journal

You've had enough or so you think. But should you really leave? Kramer, author of the best-selling Listening to Prozac, examines how people seek an answer to this crucial question of the heart. Along the way he offers great insights into the human condition and helps the reader to understand why we each do what we do about interpersonal relationships on the brink of a breakup. The book is concerned with more than just answering the title's basic question. It also delves into the intricate and complicated issue of psychotherapy and advice itself. Kramer contemplates the role of the therapist as well as the unspoken law against offering advice to his clients. Written with a keen ear for narrative, this nonfiction title reads more like well-written fiction: smooth as silk. -- Marty Dean Evensvold, Magnolia Public Library, Texas

Kirkus Reviews

Not only is this a stunning and moving look at the many-layered complexities of intimacy, it is also a neat literary trick. In the wake of his hugely successful Listening to Prozac, psychiatrist Kramer was tempted to join the parade of psychotherapists who write books of advice; his would deal with the question of when to leave a troubled relationship. Instead, he has written a much bolder book that uses the tools of the advice trade while showing up their shortcomings. Addressing the reader as "you," he also recalls the style of postmodern fiction—and indeed, that is what his admittedly fictive case histories often read like, as he presents the basic facts of a case, then recasts them over and over in various theoretical and therapeutic molds, each perspective leading to a different possible outcome in terms of what advice he might offer. Drawing on the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Jean Baker Miller, and other theorists, he examines the poles of autonomy and intimacy, betrayal and trust, identification and differentiation as they affect relationships. A Jewish man marries a Catholic woman; they agree they will not raise their children in either religion; years later the wife decides their daughter must be taught the catechism. Should he leave? A husband and wife were high school sweethearts, brought together by the unhappiness of their family lives; but her new creative and successful career is fortifying her while her husband begins to whine and then almost takes a lover. Should she leave? In the guise of trying to give advice to the people in these and other cases, Kramer simultaneously explores the near-impossibility of giving advice: People are ultimatelyunknowable, their situations too complex, the therapist blinded by his own biases. Beautifully illustrating the passion, curiosity, intellect, and sensitivity therapists bring to their work, Kramer has produced a tour de force, a book of non-advice more illuminating than any how-to could ever be.